Original-Cin Q&A: Creators of For All Mankind Talk Season Four, and Greed Taking Over After Mars
Apple TV+’s For All Mankind - the alternate-timeline drama in which the Space Race never ended – is back for a fourth season, set a decade after it took its characters to Mars.
The show cleverly mixes complex human drama and explores the possibilities that could exist if the global Space Race had continued and where humanity would be now.
Our Bonnie Laufer spoke with show creators and Executive Producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi about the fun they had taking Season 4 to the next level.
Click HERE to watch Bonnie’s Interview with For All Mankind’s Ronald D. Moore (Executive Producer/Creator) and Maril Davis (Executive Producer)
The 10-episode fourth season will debut on Friday, November 10, 2023 on Apple TV+, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday through January 12, 2024.
ORIGINAL-CIN: One of the things I love most about this series is the amount of creative freedom you have, and there is a lot to unpack with Season 4. How much fun is it to go with “alt history” but make it believable so that the audience doesn’t think it's far-fetched?
MATT WOLPERT: That's really a huge key for us. It's so much fun to talk about the what-ifs in the writers room and just really explore all the different avenues of what could have been, but also grounding it in a way that feels like this could have actually happened. We discuss what are the little ways that we can tweak something and make it beleivable.
One of my favorite details in the opening montage of Season 4 is that there's still Gore v. Bush, but it's the father. It's HW Bush that he was running against and he wins. We love exploring that stuff and figuring out how we want to change the world.
O-C: This season we see a community on Mars and fairly easy travel to get there. Even civilians are going up there to work. I bought it!
BEN NEDIVI: That's what's great about working on this show because it does start to become normal in our minds.
Why aren't we on Mars right now? What inspired the show, in many ways, was our frustration that the Space Race did sort of fizzle away and our progress slowed down.
In the ‘70s everyone felt that the next step was Mars and then beyond. So I feel for us, and a big touch point in writing the show and conceiving the show, is really giving the viewer the sense of how it would feel to live on Mars.
What, in a really grounded way if you were up there, would be the issues you're dealing with? How hard it is to talk to your family for example. Alternate ways to make a decent living. I think adding new characters this season and showing these dilemmas was a huge bonus.
O-C: Another big topic explored this season is Russia. I was blown away by Wrenn Schmidt’s performance as Margo Madison. Was she fluent in Russian because if she wasn’t, she certainly was impressive.
WOLPERT: She literally learned Russian for the show. She went to Russian class and worked her butt off! It was so important to her not to just memorize each syllable and say it, but to be able to know what she was saying and then hear what the other people were saying as an actor and respond to it as if it were English to her.
So she was very methodical in that and it really shows in her performance. I think it's maybe my favorite season of hers. I mean, I love them all. But she really is just such an impressive actor.
O-C: There is no question in my mind that the central theme in Season Four is greed. Would you agree?
NEDIVI: I think that's close and on point. The idea of space travel becoming so routine by this point, naturally leads to commerce, and the idea of capitalism.
There are new resources. These asteroids that anyone who is up there can harvest for their own gain opens a whole new can of worms. I think the more you hear about these asteroids, and when you realize it could lead to the next gold rush on Earth, how far will we go to exploit these new resources? So yes, I think, naturally, greed unfortunately is one of the impacts of this push in this race and I think that's a big theme this season that runs through.
It’s one of the things that we thought about in the writers room, it's the mixture of greed and also the adventure of a gold rush of sorts.
We actually talked a lot about classic Western movies that influenced some of the writing. Mixed with the greed and the need for treasure is also that sense of adventure and that sense of what is possible. So I think those two are definitely big keys for us this season.